Politically Speaking: Slowly, surely, Clinton moves to center

Don't look now, but Hillary's moving toward the center.

That's right, the former first lady and current junior senator from New York is slowly but surely retooling her position on a number of issues, seemingly resurrecting her husband's strategy of "triangulation" for a presidential bid.

The surprise here isn't that Clinton is posturing for a run in 2008. The surprise is how far she's straying from her liberal roots in doing so.

Over the past summer, Clinton gave a speech denouncing the number of unwanted pregnancies. She's paired up with Rick Santurom, probably the most conservative member of the Senate, to pass legislation against graphic video games. She was one of a handful of senators in her party to oppose a measure that would have killed Bush's missile defense plan. Most conspicuously, she's been a consistent hawk on Iraq, even arguing to send more troops in the face of escalating attacks.

"A couple of weeks ago, certainly a couple months ago, Hillary was off there on the left," said Chris Matthews, MSNBC news show host, last May. "We thought of her with Barbra Streisand, Barbara Boxer, Rob Reiner, Chuck Schumer even. Now I see her as sort of part of this drift toward the center."

At the same time, Clinton's been a fairly effective senator. She's taken a lesson from the playbook of one her predecessors, Sen. D'Amato, who was so attuned to local issues that he was known as Sen. Pothole. Clinton has funneled millions of federal dollars back to her constituents, especially in the conservative upstate area. Not coincidentally, she currently enjoys a 60 percent approval rate upstate, only a tad below her statewide rating of 63 percent, according to a poll conducted in August by Quinnipiac University.

There was early wagering that a strong Republican challenge in 2006 for Clinton's seat could knock her out of the Senate and, by extension, a presidential contest, but those hopes have all but evaporated. Jeanine Pirro, a district attorney with a strong criminal justice background, was tapped for this difficult assignment. When announcing her candidacy in August, she was speechless for over half a minute because a page of her speech was missing. Her later attempt to explain the gaffe didn't go much better.

"Was it my best day? Absolutely not," Pirro said, recalling the incident. "Am I better than that? Absolutely not."

Meanwhile, Clinton has been focusing on her national work in the hopes of sapping interest from the race.

Some have a predicted that there will be a sharp backlash against Clinton, long a Republican bogeywoman, in 2008. She's the subject of a nasty new biography, The Truth About Hillary, by Edward Klein, that asserts, among other things, that she's a lesbian. In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine, he added that the senator was a "radical feminist" and "a true, bred-to-the-bone, ideologue."

As Matt Bai pointed out in a profile in The New York Times Magazine, this probably isn't the case. Arguing that "politicians rarely live in the narrow ideological boxes we like to create for them," Bai writes, "Hillary Clinton was probably never as dogmatic as her most ardent critics and supporters insisted she was. She did, after all, propose controversial education reform in Arkansas, where she picked a gratuitous and colossal fight with the teachers' union by demanding that teachers submit to testing. And she strongly lobbied liberal members of Congress to support her husband's crime bill, which expanded the federal death penalty, and supported his welfare-reform plan, which prompted one of her close friends, the former Kennedy aide Peter Edelman, to resign from the administration."

Besides, the argument that Clinton's too divisive for the nomination has always been a weak one. Bush has proved that being controversial is not necessarily politically problematic. But what remains to be seen is whether her electoral arithmetic adds up in 2008. The Clintons are two of the most politically astute figures in contemporary America, but they aren't infallible. If the war continues to go badly, then Hillary's proposal to add 80,000 troops to Iraq will look less like a principled decision and and more like a fool's errand. A resolutely anti-war campaign on the part of someone like Russ Feingold, Clinton's colleague in the Senate, could completely change the dynamics of a Democratic primary battle.

But Feingold and other prospective challengers would be wise not to underestimate Hillary in gauging positions for 2008. They wouldn't be the first to lose to a Clinton.